[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHRIS HOOD: Welcome to "The Transformation Debrief."
I'm Chris Hood, a digital strategist at Google Cloud
and your host.
In each episode, we aim to stir visionary thinking
and share unexpected insights on transformation initiatives
and lessons learned along the way.
Today, my co-host for this episode,
Janet Kennedy, Vice President North America at Google Cloud,
joins me along with our guest, Thomas Bianculli,
Chief Technology Officer at Zebra Technologies.
Let's get to know our guests a little better.
Janet, would you please share a little bit about yourself?
JANET KENNEDY: I'm Janet Kennedy.
I'm the Vice President for Google Cloud for the North
American region.
I've been in tech my entire career.
The last 15 years or so, I've been
helping customers digitally transform
moving into the Cloud.
Glad to be here.
CHRIS HOOD: Tom, welcome.
Thanks for joining us.
Please share a little bit about yourself
and your role at Zebra.
THOMAS BIANCULLI: Hi, Chris.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Tom Bianculli, Chief Technology Officer
here at Zebra Technologies.
CHRIS HOOD: Zebra Technologies is a 50-year-old company
with a legacy in barcode printing and scanning devices.
They support manufacturing, retail, health care,
transportation, logistics, and public sectors
with over 10,000 partners across 100 countries.
Over the last few years, they have
acquired companies in mobile computing, real-time location
systems, robotics, AI, all to help them transform
from a traditional hardware-centric company
to a software solutions organization.
Transformation change is hard work, and it takes time.
Tom, could you tell us a little bit about some
of the initiatives so far and what has worked well and what
hasn't?
THOMAS BIANCULLI: Yeah, sure, Chris.
So as you stated, we've been in business for 50 years.
Any company that's been around for that many decades
is always transforming.
We at Zebra, we're always looking
at this intersection between what's possible
and what's valuable and trying to close that gap all the time.
And I think that's really what transformation is all about.
It's about how do you change what
you do to deliver the value that your customers rely on you
for by really innovating around the art of possible.
And that transformation for us was really
moving from a device, a tools-oriented company--
so think mobile computers and printers
and scanning that's used throughout the supply chain
to track packages or to administer a medication
bedside by a nurse to a patient or to upsell or cross-sell
inside of a retailer-- and go from that kind of product
mentality and mindset to one that's outcome driven.
CHRIS HOOD: You know, Janet, one of these ah-ha moments
that we see all the time at Google
really inspires us to help companies like Zebra.
I'm sure you've got several stories of your own.
Any ah-ha moments coming to mind for you?
JANET KENNEDY: Yeah, absolutely.
As I said, I've spent probably the last 15 years in Cloud
helping people go through the digital transformation.
And in the beginning, it was really
lift and shift, maybe move a few servers into infrastructure.
But my big ah-ha moment, frankly, was in December 2020.
We'd already gone nine months of COVID.
We've all worked at home.
350 million of our kids were being educated on the Cloud
through Google Classroom.
And what I saw, suddenly, was CEOs, CFOs, and CISOs,
the top security leaders in organizations,
they were like, oh, my gosh, we are all working on the Cloud,
the whole world is working on the Cloud.
It's working very successfully.
So why the heck do I have all these legacy data
centers and legacy costs that I have to incur?
CHRIS HOOD: Tom, let's talk a little bit about the vision.
So you've been moving slowly, fastly, quickly.
You've been moving from a hardware business
to a software business.
And I'm curious to hear a little bit more
about that journey around the enterprise asset intelligence
at the edge, or just in general the vision
you have for the organization.
THOMAS BIANCULLI: Sure.
Yeah, you hit on it there, Chris.
Enterprise asset intelligence is what we call our vision.
And that's when every asset and worker is connected, visible,
and fully optimized.
And I think Janet hit the nail on the head,
talking about the move from lift and shift
to really modernizing the underlying infrastructure.
So not just about getting on the Cloud,
but getting all the benefits that the Cloud can provide.
And so more and more, frankly, of our mutual customers,
between Google and Zebra, are looking at streaming data.
So literally taking the data that
may be coming off of a handheld or a point-of-sale unit
or a telemetry device that's in a vehicle
and sending that directly up to the Cloud in real time.
And so, as an example, a nurse in a hospital environment
is spending upwards of 50% of their time
doing things other than caring for patients, things
like documenting or transferring files
from one shift to the next.
If we can use all the data off of the device
that that nurse is using, the IoT infrastructure
that's in the room, location information that
connects patient wristbands that identifies
the patient with the medication, and we can ensure
the right patient's getting the right medication
the right way at the right time by the right caregiver,
and we just document that automatically, we
return the time to that worker to really do
what they went to school for and what they're passionate about.
| at the same time, we can make a significant dent
on the third highest cause of death
in the country, which is actually medication
administration errors.
And by being able to do all of this
automatically and collect that information,
we can ensure those errors don't occur
and we can enable those frontline workers to be
their best selves.
I mean, it's really exciting.
The notion of moving from a term everybody
knows, systems of record.
These are legacy ERP, CRM type systems, a WMS system.
They're kind of looking in a rearview way, right?
They're telling you what should be happening
or maybe what happened in the past.
And by the very definition of their name,
record indicates it's kind of a historical view.
And as Janet touched upon, so many of our customers
are saying, what got me here isn't
going to get me there, right?
I'm not going to innovate around a system of record.
I don't want to know what should be happening
or what happened in the past.
I want to know what's happening now
and what to do in the future.
So I want to get really descriptive
about what's happening and then predictive
and prescriptive about what to drive in the workflow.
CHRIS HOOD: Tom, so I think you mentioned it,
transformation really doesn't have an ending point.
But I was in your offices probably four years ago,
and I know you started your transformation journey probably
before that, 2014, 2015.
And I'm looking at, what's the future?
What's your next step of your transformation journey?
And do you think you have any roadblocks in the way?
THOMAS BIANCULLI: Yeah.
Yeah, great question.
I think what you started off with is certainly
true is that transformation never really stops.
If I think about the early days in the first year or so
of that transformation, it was really around an awareness.
Is there really even a change that's needed?
Is transformation even the right word, that getting people
aligned to that level of agreement
and moving it forward.
And I think, obviously, we're way past that.
We're seeing the fruits of that the early days
of that transformation.
But I think ultimately, when you look
at where we want to take things, it's
got to be about, once again, helping
that frontline worker be the best person they can be
and offloading all of the distractions.
And there's a lot of work to do to get to that--
to get to that level.
And I think we're in the early innings
really of just being able to digitize the workflows,
be able to collect the data, use that data maybe
to point to where there are opportunities,
and mobilize those as actions down
to those frontline workers.
CHRIS HOOD: Another area that we're struggling with right
now is supply chains.
How have you and Zebra looked at--
or have helped in the supply chain world?
THOMAS BIANCULLI: Yeah.
So a couple of things, maybe just
very quickly come at it from two perspectives.
One is, first off, transportation logistics
overall is our second largest vertical behind retail.
And classically, we've been helping with track
and trace through that supply chain.
And by monitoring that, we can create those better outcomes
of reducing waste, for example, in a food scenario,
or ensuring the efficacy of a medication,
in the case of a vaccine.
So that's what we have today.
Where we're going is kind of the Cloud enabled version of that.
So just use your imagination.
What if that tag that's on the package of produce
or biopharmaceutical was not just discretely readable
at the point of delivery as to whether it's
in temperature profile or out, but what
if it was streaming that temperature data back
live to the Cloud?
And what if the same time we were streaming back
the location of that asset so we knew its condition
and its identification and its location,
and we knew all of that in real time.
So that's really where we want to take things,
and we think we've got a great start with what we're already
delivering, plus the Cloud transformation we're on,
to go realize that future.
CHRIS HOOD: What business problems keep you up at night?
THOMAS BIANCULLI: So one of the business areas or challenges
that we talk about is, are we moving fast enough?
We're always asking ourselves that question.
And if what's happening outside our company
is moving faster than what's happening inside,
then we're falling behind.
So move fast would be my number one.
CHRIS HOOD: Thank you, Tom, for joining us.
And thank you, Janet, for your insights and participation
as well.
If you'd like to learn more about Zebra Technologies,
we have two channels for you to explore.
At cloud.google.com/transform, we dive deeper into this
transformation journey.
And you can tune into "That Digital Show"
to hear the extended podcast version of this conversation.
And don't forget to hit Subscribe and join us again
for more visionary thinking and lessons
learned on the next episode of "The Transformation Debrief."
[MUSIC PLAYING]